


Runaways

by tenzo



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-21
Updated: 2010-09-21
Packaged: 2017-10-12 01:51:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/119467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tenzo/pseuds/tenzo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the summer of 2011, my grandmother died, my mum had an affair, and the Smiths moved in next door.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Runaways

In the winter of 2012, when I was 16, my parents separated.

In the summer of 2011, my grandmother died, my mum had an affair, and the Smiths moved in next door.

I don't remember the house having even been for sale. Our old neighbours were a couple of empty-nesters, or perhaps altogether childless–I never knew because we barely spoke to one another. I want to think that the sounds of their daily life so mirrored and faded in to the sounds of ours that it would have been impossible for me to note them, but I'm fairly certain it was just the myopia of being a teenager. Old enough to understand that there are whole other worlds laying one on top of another like the skin of an onion, but not old enough to care.

One day a lorry just appeared in front of the house next door, and when I looked out from my bedroom window, I didn't wonder where the former occupants had gone. I watched for a long time, to try and determine whether there were any kids my age moving in, my skin prickling at the possibility of finding such evidence. I began to formulate a system of surveillance so that I could determine when I might enter and exit my own house so as to remain unknown to any possible teenagers next door. I contemplated buying a new notebook to keep my observations in.

To my relief, no surly, floppy-haired, spotty new neighbours appeared, and I remained secure in my position as the only one of those for 5000 square metres. I did catch a furtive look at the actual residents, though not furtive enough because the man glanced quite keenly at me as I peeped around the curtain. He smiled. I nearly jumped out of my skin and vowed to never–never again as long as I lived–spy on people from my bedroom window. I made a lot of vows that year. I didn't keep any of them.

I assumed that, like their predecessors, the new residents would erect a neighbourly emotional wall between their home and ours. Goodness knows, we'd laid our own bricks quite soundly already. I didn't think any more about them.

Two hours later, the bell rang. Mum was out and dad had gone to visit his own mother in hospital. I was in the kitchen, making myself a cheese sandwich and contemplating sitting in front of the telly with it. At first I couldn't figure out what the sound even was; no one ever rang our bell. I probably flinched.

Not getting the door didn't really occur to me. Likewise it didn't occur to me that my movements in the kitchen were plainly visible through the sheer curtains of the living room bay window. I wiped my hands on my jeans and took a deep breath, prepared to simply give a speech about how my parents were not in. I had to prepare such a script in advance, or else I might open my mouth and out everything would tumble. I'd say that my mum wasn't home because she was having an affair with a close family friend (not working late at all). I'd say I knew that for a fact because I'd skived off classes one afternoon and caught them at it, but that I'd been so quiet they'd never known, and I'd never said. I'd say that my father was devastated by the illness of his mother and was weighted down with the guilt of not having had a terribly good relationship with her. I'd say that my school marks were iffy at best and that I quite frankly didn't care about them anyway, though I knew that I should.

Instead I said, "Mum and Dad aren't in."

I mumbled and let my fringe fall in to my eyes, and they tried to be friendly but I was fairly certain that no one in my family deserved that level of congeniality, least of all me. After they left, I ate my sandwich sitting at the kitchen table, no telly.

That night I nipped out to have a fag in the back garden before bed. It was quiet, long past midnight, and the air was clammy. I'd not put any shoes on and the grass was already slick with dew. I sat on the wall next to the rabbit hutch and lit up.

"That's not a very healthy habit," I heard a voice say, and for a fleeting second I thought it was my father and I just about proved the speaker right by having a heart attack on the spot. I coughed, a little puff of smoke exiting my nostrils and getting in my eyes.

"You a doctor or something?" I replied, seeing that it was just the man from next door, in his own yard, doing something that very closely resembled lurking in the shadow of their garden shed.

"Yeah," he said. "Actually, I am."

"Well, good on ya'." I took another drag. "My parents already know," I added quickly, hoping to cut off at the pass any attempt at neighbourly busy-bodiness. They didn't know, though I'm not sure either would have really cared that deeply.

He just laughed, a high sort of girlish little giggle.

He introduced himself as Dr. Smith, but said his friends just called him Doctor. His wife was Rose and he gave me a second to make a connection, though I never did. I later learnt that she had been some sort of heiress with a mysterious past, but what fifteen-year-old boy cares about that kind of thing? He didn't seem offended that I didn't know who she was, and never really mentioned it again.

He always seemed to be out at that garden shed when I went for a smoke at nights. Or maybe I always seemed to want a fag whenever he was lurking back there. Mrs. Smith was never with him at those times, though every now and then I'd see a light come on in their house for a few minutes while we were outside.

"Does she mind that you come out here so much, then?" I asked one night as we shared the sort of companionable silence that I'd never known with any of my peers before. "The missus, I mean."

"The missus?" he asked, and I had a brief moment of panic when I thought I'd gotten the adult lingo wrong.

"Yeah, Mrs. Smith. Your wife?"

"Oh, you mean Rose!" he said, laughing quietly. "I never think of her as _the missus_ , as you say. But no, she doesn't mind. I sometimes have trouble sleeping, and it's better for me to be out here than up there tossing about and keeping her up."

"Insomnia?" I asked, again reaching for a more grown-up sounding word and hoping it didn't sound horribly stilted and rehearsed coming out of my mouth.

"I guess, yeah. I sleep better after I've been out here for a while. There's something... there's something about it, it's calming. It soothes me, I guess you could say, but that makes me sound like a terrible brute who needs soothing."

I shrugged. "Same reason I come out for a fag."

He nodded and put his hands in his pockets, falling silent again. It should have been creepy; some old bugger and a kid sitting around on a garden wall in the middle of a night, not saying anything. The thought didn't occur to me until years later that perhaps I should have been concerned he was a kiddie-fiddler, or a serial killer or something like that. At the time it seemed reasonable enough that a bloke might need to get some air before being able to sleep.

I know I did.

Once the weather started to warm up proper, I began to contemplate getting some air permanently. The crushing secret of my mum's affair–with a man I'd known since I was a child, who'd minded me so my parents could go out for dates–it was getting to be too much. Every 30 seconds I changed my mind about what to do about what I knew, until one choice grew large and continued to loom over all the others, pushing them aside: Leave. Just pack up and leave home and don't look back.

I didn't feel like leaving would be my way of punishing my parents, or showing them how much they'd miss me if I'd gone, or anything like that. It was just a way to escape. I knew they'd be upset, and I didn't want them to be necessarily, but kids are selfish. I was selfish.

Selfish, but not impulsive. I was never an impulsive child, and I eschewed all of the stupid things that teenagers do because they can't control their baser hormonal urges. I took perverse pride in my powers of self-control, planning ahead, organising and tidying. It was one thing to set me apart from my peers, though not something that would earn me points with them in any way, shape or form.

Having decided to leave, I began to plan. I picked a date (20th July, the longest day of the year), and I'd begun the laborious process of deciding what to pack, and in what quantity. I made lists in a special little notebook I'd purchased at the newsagent, and I read them over obsessively.

"I love a new notebook," Dr. Smith said one night at the wall. "Those blank white pages... they can be anything, but at the beginning they're just potential."

I grunted and went back to thumbing through my latest list: places where I could sleep for free.

"Sometimes I feel bad for messing up all that perfection with my scribbling. But then what's a notebook for but for writing in, I guess."

"Yeah," I said, feeling the building urge to tell him about my lists, and feeling ashamed of the impulse.

"Of course I'd never want to pry in to the secret thoughts and feelings of the British teenager or anything..." He craned his neck slightly, trying to be subtle, but rather failing. "Oh go on then, I'm dying to know!"

"What?" I shut my notebook so fast it made a startling little popping noise.

"You've been carrying that notebook around for a week now and I hate a mystery. Hate hate hate it. You'll have to forgive me, but I'm very rude and you've piqued my interest." He swung his legs around over the wall so we were both facing the same way, for the first time ever in our nightly meetings. "So what is it? Poems to the girl you fancy? Or boy, perhaps?"

I made a face and he smirked but then shifted his features to look contrite.

"All right then, no girls or boys. Oh, but tell me you're secretly in a rock band and those are your songs! You know, I play a mean guitar. So I've been told. By... one person. Once."

I shook my head and let my fringe fall in to my face without brushing it away.

"Well, whatever it is, I'm sure it's not meticulous plans for running away," he said, suddenly serious, and I snapped my head up to find him ready to meet my eye with an unwavering, disconcerting gaze.

"Well, I–" I stammered, and I could feel blood rushing to my face with embarrassment and fear. Would he tell my parents now? He'd not told them about my smoking, but this was something a bit different.

He tapped his temple with a finger. "Very good night vision," he said. "There's not that many other reasons for a boy your age to have a list of all the train and coach stations in the greater London area. Though I like what you've done with your system of annotation and ratings."

I ran my thumb over the cover of my notebook and with great effort broke away from his look of understanding and pity. It was too much and I felt all my plans crumbling around me; all my beautiful lists and schedules, all for nought.

"It doesn't mean anything," I mumbled and stood up again, brushing the dirt off the seat of my jeans. "I've gotta go."

"Indeed," he said pointedly. "Or you feel you do."

I turned around to face him again, not understanding what he was on about.

"And I completely understand." He smiled benignly and that suddenly lit a fire in me of a sort that I don't think I'd ever felt before in my life.

"No," I said evenly, through gritted teeth. "There is no possible way you would understand."

He raised an eyebrow and blinked slowly. "You're right," he admitted. "I don't _completely_ understand."

I turned and took a few steps back towards my house but he called my name softly. Calmly. I turned around and he was already climbing over the wall again to his own property, motioning for me to follow. I looked towards my back door, and then over to him again, standing next to his garden shed and smiling.

I thought then that I'd better humour him. Perhaps if I went along with him, agreed with what he said when he inevitably told me that running away wouldn't solve my problems, he'd think I'd given up my plans and wouldn't tell my parents. I hopped over the wall and shuffled towards him.

"I have something to show you," he said, pushing the shed door open. He entered first with me right behind, and really there wasn't much room in there for more than two at a time. Inside was a little folding table, like the one we had in our kitchen. On the table was a jam jar.

In the jam jar was what looked like a rock, except it was glowing slightly, pulsating. I felt a tickle in the back of my mind, like where I felt it when I did something stupid and knew it and was just waiting for the inevitable fallout to occur. Except it was a pleasant tickle, sort of calming and reassuring.

"What is _that_?" I asked finally, and in the dim light I could see Dr. Smith looking like quite the proud father, beaming down at his little jam jar with its little bit of rock.

"That," he said, "is my notebook full of train timetables."

I just blinked at him, but the tickle in the back of my mind was becoming more like a song I could just barely hear, and I was concentrating on not losing it. It sounded so familiar but I couldn't place it. "It's your... Do you hear that?"

His eyes crinkled and he grinned broadly. "I do hear that. That's her." He gestured to the rock in the jar. "But I didn't bring you in here to talk about her. Not _really_. And I'd suggest you not get me started on the topic because I've been told that I can really rabbit on and bore the socks off everyone present." He looked down at his feet and mine, both bare on the dirt floor of the shed. "Though I see that you are not wearing any socks."

At that I had to laugh, and the laughing seemed to come out easier, helped by the little tickle and the humming far-away song.

"Why _did_ you bring me, then?" I asked.

"To show you that I do understand. Running away, it's sort of my speciality." He pronounced the final word with five syllables. "I've been told that it's what I do best, and I'm not sure I'd want to dispute that. It's good to strive for goals, isn't it?"

"I don't... I mean, what does that rock thing have to do with running away? I don't get it."

"That 'rock thing' is all I have left of my ability to run away. You've got the 21:33 to Saffron Walden, but I had... oh, _so_ much more. Anywhere I wanted to go, with anyone, at any time. Imagine that. I mean really imagine it. Imagine how far and how fast you could run if you could literally go _anywhere_."

I did imagine it and it sounded wonderful. I think I sort of lost the thread for a bit, just thinking of all the places I'd go; making a list, annotating it with timetables, putting things in rank order. I'm sure several minutes passed before I remembered that I was meant to be having a conversation, not daydreaming.

"What happened?" I asked finally.

"Mmm," he mused and fell silent for a few seconds. "Some might say karmic retribution. That's rubbish, of course, but it is pretty poetic, don't you think? The man who never stopped running gets grounded once and for all. Maybe for life; that remains to be seen."

"Do you want to leave Mrs. Smith, then?" I had started to see a kindred spirit in him and perhaps in that simplistic way of children thought that we might set out together. It sounded plausible to me at the time.

He laughed a long time at that, in a way that made me want to curl in to a tiny ball from embarrassment. "I think you'll find that Mrs. Smith has top marks in running away herself. Why do you think I married her?" His face got very serious again, very quickly and he looked down at his feet. "Though I would probably, eventually. Not because I don't love her, but because I do."

I thought hard about his words. No adult had ever talked to me like this, so honestly, and I felt I owed it to him to try and understand what he was saying.

"I love my parents," I said. It felt weird to state it out loud like that. It had always just been something that people assumed: my parents love me, I love my parents, it's the way of the world, isn't it?

"But you want to leave them."

"I don't _want_ to. You know, I'm not one of those ASBO types, trying to get out of the house so I can get pissed with my mates every night. I like it here. Well, as much as I like it anywhere."

"That's even sadder, then." He reached out and touched the jam jar, centred it on the table and sort of stroked the rim.

"You're not telling me not to."

He put his hands back in his pockets, and it struck me that he did so merely as a way to keep himself from touching the jar and the rock inside any more."I'm not. I think you're clever enough to figure it all out on your own. But I will say this: all the running I've done, and I never found any place without pain. And sadness. And love. If you find that place, you be sure to post me the directions, all right?"


End file.
